Christmas Elephant Encounter

With it having just been Christmas, I was thinking back to all the previous ways I've spent Christmas in recent years and came back to this specific trip.

December 2017, I was on safari at the Victoria Falls National Park in Zimbabwe. We had been driving around with our guide since the early morning and had seen a great variety of animals, from giraffes to zebra and wild deer. We’d stopped for a lunch break already, and it was coming towards the end of our day trip. As our guide set off back toward the entrance of the park, he took a final detour to a special spot he was saving for last. Our car pulled off the road into a clearing, and the engine stopped.

We waited. 5 minutes passed, and we waited still. Two other safari cars ambled past us, little did they know what they were about to miss out on. Top tip: always go with an experienced guide, this guy had been doing tours of Vic Falls Park for over 25 years!

After about 10 minutes of waiting, we heard a rustling, and finally a single elephant appeared out of the bush. He waited, sort of inspecting us, and suddenly a stream of 4 more elephants appeared. As we sat in awe, two calves ambled out with their mother, shielded by her as the elders assessed us and our car.

As the elephants moseyed out of the bush, we heard a splashing from a slight distance away. Starting up the engine and taking a short drive around the corner, we opened up onto the alpha male cooling himself off in the mud. Slowly, one by one, the others joined him - until there was an entire group of elephants all basking in the cool bath. They splashed and rolled about, coating themselves in the mud in the strong heat of the mid-afternoon.

To give an idea of scale and how close we were to these magnificent beings, the image of the elephants in the mud bath was shot at 50mm.

A truly fantastic experience that I will remember for a very long time. Please check out the rest of the wildlife images from this day over on my website: www.joeunsworth.com/wildlife